Privacy preserving smart-metering George Danezis, Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K. |
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Metering consumption and billing has been a traditional reason
to collect, process and store detailed records. Proposed
business models and government practices, such as electronic
road tolling, pay-as-you-drive-insurance, smart-grids for
electricity and even virtualised computing and storage, rely
on charging users using even more fine grained information
than ever before for their usage and consumption. This is at
odds with the privacy consumers have been accustomed to.
Current implementation proposals require huge databases of
personal information to be built - we show that these are not
necessary.
We present protocols for metering and fine grained billing
that do not require the collection, processing or storage of
personal information. We focus on the example of smart-grids
to show how meter readings can be cryptographically
transformed by users' devices to apply a tariff policy, and
produce a bill for the utility companies. Using Zero-knowledge
techniques our protocols perfectly hide all privacy sensitive
information, while protecting the integrity of the bills. We
also discuss practical deployment issues and 3 implementations
providing different trade-offs in speed, scalability and
software correctness.
DPM 2011 Program |